Living Ink founder Scott Fulbright and designer Kathryn Larsen on the promise of algal pigments
A Market Blindspot
Scott Fulbright has an easy time selling his algae-based pigment to investors.
“They’re like, ‘who uses ink?’. And I’m like, Look around your room. And they’re like, Oh yeah. Like, okay. It’s everywhere”
Scott’s company is Living Ink Technologies, a Colorado-based start-up making algal pigments for clients across the ink, plastics, cosmetics, and textiles industries. It has already supplied Nike, Marmot, and Patagonia with colourants for their clothing lines. More big collaborations are in the pipeline for next year.
Fulbright’s pitch underlines what should be an obvious point: pigment is critical in all design and manufacture. Even in the digital age, we rely on them to communicate through paper media and textiles. Colour schemes in our built environment can alter our moods and alert us to danger, conveying practical information more quickly than words alone.
Yet pigments are still an overlooked element in sustainable manufacturing. The most obvious reason for this is that there are still few biobased alternatives available.
“Like five years ago, we talked to all the big ink companies and we said ‘where’s the challenge in ink and what needs to be done [in terms of] sustainability? And every single one just said, no one’s really worked on the pigment”.
Bio-based pigments are still so rare that the ink in any product is often what limits it from being fully biodegradable and non-toxic. For Scott, this challenge is what makes the field so exciting. “We want to push the envelope on sustainability”, he says.
Carbon Black From The Sea
Living Ink is hyper-specialised. It currently only markets a jet-black pigment, either in its raw state or mixed up into its ink range.
This dark pigment comes from by-products of seaweed cultivation, an already low-impact industry. Working with scientists from the University of Colorado, Living Ink has calculated that the product is carbon negative.
Living Ink’s pigment is a dupe for a shade known across industry as carbon black. It is aptly named, since most of what’s currently on the market comes from fossil fuel sources. This garden variety pigment litters the consumer design landscape and when you see it, you can’t unsee it.
“When I look at my keyboards on my computer, in my iPhone case, in my headphones, this is all carbon black pigment”.
Most consumers are unaware that their products are full of petrochemical colourants. Perhaps it is easy to assume that paints and pigments are quaint hangovers of the analogue age and likely to come from biological sources anyway.
Yet there are also real technical difficulties in making a biobased pigment that performs as well as petrochemical colourants. One of the biggest is making sure the pigment doesn’t fade under UV light.
Scott’s company has managed to overcome this problem with its trademark hue. Its bio-pigment is “really black” he says, and doesn’t fade under UV. It’s also temperature and pH resistant.
The proof comes in the roster of brands lining up to use his products. Companies like Nike, Scott says, are “cutthroat when it comes to performance. So they’ve done the testing.”
Living Ink’s Carbon Black has also broken into the luxury fashion market. The leather goods company Coach has worked the pigment into Italian tanned leather.
Nonetheless, the company is not resting easy. While its inks and pigment are the most eco-friendly within its segment, there is still progress to be made.
“[Our] dispersants – an additive that’s added to ink to help keep the pigments from sticking together – [are] like 50% bio-based and 50% still petroleum based. We’re starting to test 100% bio-based dispersants from different groups.”
Achieving a 100 percent bio-based colourant is a tall order but Living Ink has already managed breakthroughs for certain applications. The Patagonia hang tags it worked on were entirely bio, with soy and linseed vegetable oil used as dispersant ingredients.
The Colour Shift
Cost is a major determining factor in biomaterial adoption but it becomes an overwhelming priority within an emerging sub-segment like bio-pigments.
Living Ink tries to lower the entry barrier for clients by partnering with two packaging and printer companies. When its customers use Ecoenclose or D&K Printers, there is no difference in price compared to conventional printing.
Of course, other factors come into play. Some brands buying Scott’s products see the marketing value in incorporating a careful detail like bio-based colouration within their products. On the other hand, other early adopters simply see bio-based products as the obvious ethical choice.
“Patagonia didn’t say a single thing about our algae ink on their material. They’re not doing it for marketing, Patagonia’s doing it because they think it’s the right thing to do.” Likewise, Nike did not mention the algae ink in their marketing. In some quarters at least, bio-based manufacturing is becoming the default.
Spira’s Microalgae Rainbow
Living Technologies plans to expand its palette in the future. For the moment, however, the stars of the algal colour spectrum are Spira Ltd., a pre-seed company creating microalgae-based chemical ingredients for food, cosmetics and textile companies.
Spira is unusual in the algae startup space, which is better known for innovating in low-carbon packaging than colourants. Yet a developed bio-pigment sector can only complement the algae-based consumer packaging industry For green materials to gain equal footing with non-renewable equivalents, they will need to be fully customisable for market differentiation and consumer appeal.
Although Spira’s pigments are still in development, their diversity puts to rest the notion that organic colourants are limited to drab neutrals. Aside from the expected earthy tones, it has produced bright orange, a dark red, a deep marine green, electric blue, and a dusky pink.
Different microalgae species supply the various shades. Spira’s electric blue and green for example are taken from spirulina while their browns are from Dunaliella salina, a salt-water algae. A blood red is made up from chemicals inside the Haematococcus pluvialis.
Each species produces different pigment chemicals as a byproduct of their unique biological adaptations. Haematococcus pluvialis for example changes from green to red to protect itself from UV rays.
Spira is also drawing on this biological array to create biobased food dyes. Many of these algae are full of nutrients and common through the supplements industry. Ordinary food dyes have a reputation for being unhealthful additives but Spira’s innovations are creating visually attractive and nutritional food enhancers.
Building With Bio-Pigments
Bio-pigments’ uses extend beyond consumer manufacturing. Architectural designer Kathryn Larsen of Kathryn Larsen Studios is incorporating Spira’s pigments into her building work.
Kathryn began thinking about bio-pigments earlier than most. “My mom used to give me spirulina for extra iron intake. I mistakenly thought spirulina was ground up spinach at first. After I found out it was algae, I was surprised.”
Her collaboration with Spira began during her master’s thesis at Delft University of Technology. Now, Kathryn is drawing on bio-resources to explore new kinds of architecture.
“I worked as an architect and after 6 years in the building industry, I was really irritated that we keep using the same horrible materials for construction. So I decided to kickstart development into natural materials through my own studio”.
She has already used Spira’s pigments in her studio’s seaweed bioplastic and as a pigment in the natural paints she is developing.
Recently, Kathryn has been posting images of Spira-based paint swatches washed across her favoured construction material, seagrass – another low-carbon marine biomass. The work is in preparation for new sustainable acoustic materials, part of her partnership with Danish material manufacturer Søuld.
“I often match textures to the colour, when I’m designing my material installations for example. I can also never predict how they will express themselves when applied in paint for example, so I constantly have to make new tests, tinker and adapt formulations.”
Yet Larsen is upfront about the challenges that come with using bio-pigments.
“They may not react in predictable ways. Each pigment reacts differently to my paint base. Some are better in certain paint bases than others. Sometimes this can look really good when applied on one material, like paper, versus another, like a wooden board. It’s really important to go with the flow when using them.”
However, natural variability is not something unique to bio-pigments. Scott Fulbright echoed Larsen’s comments, explaining that an element of trial-and-error is unavoidable with both synthetic or bio-based colouring.
“There’s 75 different ways you can screen print something, depending on the squeegee and the angle. So, we sent that to Nike’s printer and they’re like, Oh, this stuff works great. And then there’s other printers where we’re like, they’re like, hey, help us troubleshoot. And we’re like, why are you having trouble? That’s very common in the ink industry.”
Given how capricious pigments can be, physical performance is not the biggest obstacle holding back the bio-based industry. Rather, it is scaling.
“It is easy to have lots of great ideas implemented on a small scale, and much harder to bring it to a massive building project” says Kathryn, expressing the familiar concern of anyone working in the biomaterials space today.
Scott of Living Ink has clear solutions to the scaling problem. In his mind, the onus lies with large brands.
“What we really need from brands right now is really good collaborations. A lot of the factories that we work with don’t really care about sustainability and they don’t really care about innovation. So what we need is the Patagonias of the world saying, ‘Hey, huge, huge printer, the biggest printer in the world, please use this ink’”.
